• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Then Erskine became aware of a sound, a ticking, clicking sound; and, with a start, he realized that Catcher was staring directly at him from across the old pub. Catcher’s eyes were little grey pebbles. Little grey pebbles that blinked once every eight seconds – precisely, Erskine had timed them – as if there were a mechanism of clockwork inside his head.

Ticking.

Clicking.

‘Hellfire and sodomy,’ Erskine exclaimed, then realized that he’d actually shouted it out at the top of his voice.

When Roslyn Forrester slouched back to the house on Burr Street – at about 19:30 hours, by her reckoning – someone was waiting for her on the stoop.

‘Want any help?’ he said.

He was, by local standards, a boy. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, with the kind of face that would have found him a good role in a spaghetti western, had he been born two hundred years later. There were no teenagers here, Roz remembered. There were boys, and there were men, with nothing in between but wet dreams and bad complexions. The boy’s clothes fitted so badly that they could only have been stolen.

‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked, not trusting him an inch.

The boy shrugged. ‘Can’t be easy, looking after the house by yourself. Me, I’m ready to work cheap. Just naturally generous, that’s me. So I got to thinking, well, give the woman a chance, let her know she should get me now ‘fore I’m in demand.’ He gave her a grin that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, except for the fact that it was yellow.

Roz just scowled. He didn’t react, meaning that she was too tired even to scowl properly.

‘You know anything about temporal engineering?’ she asked.

‘Say again?’

‘Restructuring local space–time in order to facilitate movement through the fourth dimension. Know anything about it?’

The boy nodded thoughtfully. ‘Haaaahhh. Well, I can put shoes on horses. Don’t know if you could get them through your fourth dimension. Maybe you’d have to give ‘em a push.’

Roz scowled again, reminding herself that sarcasm wasn’t exclusive to her own century. She failed to think of any witty or half-intelligent response, so she just told him to piss off.

‘Right,’ said the boy, as if it were perfectly normal for people to talk to him like that. He gangled to his feet. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘It’d better be a good one.’

‘You some kind of lunatic?’

‘I’m the best kind of lunatic. Dementus futurus, the lesser–

spotted ranting bloody psychopath. Now get lost.’

The boy shrugged. ‘Your loss,’ he said, and sulked off around a corner.

Roz unlocked the front door with a carefully placed kick, and dragged herself into the main hall of the house. The hall was large but mostly empty, ringed with columns of fake marble that made no difference to the way the roof stayed up.

There were a lot of houses like that in Woodwicke. America had just worked out that it was an expanding empire, so the architects had decided to make every building look like a Roman ruin. A cheap, tasteless, badly furnished Roman ruin, in this case.

It wasn’t much of a house, Roz told herself, but it was home. Not her home, obviously, and the owner would get a hell of a shock if he unexpectedly came back to it, but it was the only place she’d been able to find, and even that had been a fluke. As far as she’d been able to figure out, the owner was some kind of second-rate businessman who’d waltzed off to Asia to deal in commodities that no one wanted to talk to her about; he wasn’t due back until spring, which gave her about two months more to pretend to be the housekeeper. Slave.

Whatever.

Six weeks, she’d been here now. Six weeks of sneaking and scraping that made a survival training course on Ponten Luna Sierra look like an all-expenses-paid holiday on Disneyplanet.

Six weeks of very little sleep and even less food.

Six weeks of looking for the TARDIS.

As for the time before that... just random images. Arizona had opened up and swallowed her, Chris telling her to get out of the crukking way as she’d been sucked through a crack in the world. Then she was running, she was trying not to look back at the gynoid,